The Far Away Years by L.F. Blake – Review

Title: The Far Away Years
Author: L.F. Blake
Genre: M/M Romance
URL: Torquere Press
Price: US$5.95
Warnings: Explicit m/m sex, rough language, drug use, mild violence.
Summary (from Publisher’s Website): Danny and Jeff have never had an easy relationship. Danny admits early on that he wants Jeff, maybe even loves him, but all Jeff wants is a normal life, at least as normal as a rock star can have. Over the years, the two of them will come together and drift apart, as Danny spirals deeper into depression over what he feels is an unrequited love.
Jeff has his own reasons for pushing Danny away, but when he finally decides to take life by the horns and find Danny again, it might be too late. Can Jeff and Danny find a way to put their past behind them, and build a future as bright as the prospects of their new band?

My Review: As a voracious reader of modern gay literary fiction, I’m forever seeking stories that are not typical of the genre. The offerings from Alyson, Haworth, Green Candy and all the usual suspects in gay publishing, while not all bad, tend toward contemporary stories about LGBT social issues (coming out, homophobia, AIDs) with positive role models, and the e-book market is glutted with science fiction, fantasy and full-on, hardcore erotica – much of dubious quality. Almost no fetish remains unmined – cowboys (an explosion since the success of Brokeback Mountain), military men, shape-shifters, secret agents, misfit high schoolers and Midwestern farm boys. But there is one subculture that remains seriously neglected and it happens to be a personal favourite. With the exception of Joel Lane’s From Blue to Black and Dennis Cooper’s surreal graphic novel, Horror Hospital Unplugged, serious stories about gay rock musicians have been all but unrepresented in queer fiction. With any luck, L.F. Blake’s The Far Away Years will achieve some notoriety and help to change that.

It tells of the volatile relationship between Danny and Jeff, two members of Far Cry, a hard rock band gaining success in the late seventies/early eighties. Danny, the charismatic, diminutive, red-haired singer, is obsessively in love with Jeff, the tall, dark and handsome Latino guitarist. But Jeff is deep in denial about his homosexuality, despite carrying on a years-long extramarital affair with Danny, inadvertently stringing him along and leading him to despair and self-destruction.

I was drawn in from the very first page. Blake’s writing is sharp and concise. The dialogue, peppered with contractions, colloquialisms and four-letter words, crackles with authenticity. And the author has seemingly no compunction about depicting realistic, three dimensional characters – warts and all. She doesn’t shy away from the drinking and drug use that’s rampant in the rock biz. Refreshing, when so often in LGBT fiction writers seem unnaturally concerned with proving that gay people are paragons of virtue (in a desperate attempt to disprove the accusations of the religious right, one imagines). See Stewart Lewis’s wishy-washy Rockstarlet as a prime example of this practice. But real people are flawed. Often terribly so. They can often be casually cruel, rude, combative and self-destructive. Blake’s characters are all of these things and despite this [and sometimes because of it] they’re completely relatable – loveable even. Well done.

This is not to say the book is without its flaws. Jeff’s long-suffering wife, Lani, surely a victim by anyone’s standards, is depicted as an egocentric, sexually withholding celebrity wannabe, a harridan and (horrors!) a bad mother. One can only assume this is all in aid of justifying [in the mind of the reader] her husband’s inevitable emergence from the closet to leave her. She is the book’s only true caricature and an egregious one at that. Seriously, why is this woman portrayed as such an unreasonable wretch when she refuses to allow Danny, an active heroin user, to babysit her infant daughter? Would you? Would anyone? Some of my best friends were druggies back in the day and I wouldn’t leave my cats in their care.

I was also disappointed that there was just about no focus on the band’s rise to fame. In complete contrast to the Lane book which is fraught with all the niggling details of songwriting, performances and press coverage, Blake spends virtually no time showing Far Cry recording, making videos, playing gigs or checking the pop charts and, as such, the book suffers from a serious lack of atmosphere. After all, much of this takes place in the early eighties – when the burgeoning MTV had a stranglehold on the world’s music buying habits. Who can forget the terrific scene in the film Parting Glances wherein Steve Buscemi’s character, Nick, sits up all night just to get a glimpse of his indie band’s video on MTV? Or what about that wonderful moment in That Thing You Do when The Wonders do a jig around the appliance store upon first hearing themselves on the radio? I suspect Blake, who is only twenty-two and a product of the digital music age, doesn’t remember the heady days when airplay was king. Injecting more period detail and some music biz background at the expense of cutting a few of the numerous encounters between the two leads would’ve made the book that much stronger. She could particularly afford to sacrifice a good portion of the book’s latter half, which is almost too saccharine for its own good.

But I have to say, overall this one surprised me. Blake has an incredible ear for her characters’ voices and has created two protagonists that are complicated, interesting and sexy. And while the story could be tightened up with the elimination of redundant scenes and the inclusion of some nitty-gritty detail, as a first novel, I was mightily impressed and hope L.F Blake publishes more out of the ordinary gay fiction in the future.